A Whole Lot of Churches

Our hotel balcony has a view of the Bordeaux cathedral, and a split of champagne is chilling in the mini-fridge. What more could one want?

Maybe a whole lot of churches. And an abbey!

Our day began, after a delicious sleep fueled by the previous evening's escargots and foie gras, with a visit to aforementioned cathedral, St. Andre. Gothic, very high, built between the 12th and the 14th century. It turns out that this is where Eleanor of Aquitaine married her first husband, Prince Louis, who later became king of France. So naturally I got twitchy and excited again. There are links to my characters everywhere! 

Eleanor and me, chatting

As in Spain, everything closes here for lunch between 12 and 2, except for the Porte Cailhau, a tower built in the city walls where I imagine Blanche and Eleanor met the bishop of Bordeaux when they entered the city. We climbed many stairs and found an animated narration from Eleanor in the tower, explaining which of the buildings we could see from the windows were around in her day. See what I mean? They are EVERYWHERE. 

Tomb of St. Severin

Eleanor spent a lot of time in Bordeaux, both growing up and after her marriage -- but not so much later in her life, because she didn't like Louis much and I guess Bordeaux triggered her.

We lunched and then went to the Church of St. Severin. Both it and the cathedral are UNESCO sites and are on the Camino de Santiago, so they receive hundreds of pilgrims every year. St. Severin's body is kept on the high altar, and in the crypt are the bodies of many bishops and another saint -- and one tomb that contained the heads of 22 nuns and a priest who were guillotined after the French Revolution. We looked for the horn of Roland, who blew it when he fought beside Charlemagne in the battle of Roncesvalles (another link!) but it had been moved to Paris. Supposedly it was made from a unicorn horn, but I'm not sure how historically accurate that is. 

St.  Louis

Our final church was the Dominican church of Notre Dame, which was not linked with Blanche and Eleanor in any way. We were told to see it, though, by someone who knows about things, and were very pleased by its somewhat restrained Jesuit baroque style. All three churches have very unusual gray brick ceilings, which I've never seen before. And Notre Dame DID have a link -- a painting of St. Louis, who was Blanche's son. 

In the morning we headed to Poitiers -- the real seat of Eleanor's power. But because of distances and highways and mistakes with maps and itineraries that you don't need to know about, we went first to the Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud, north of Poitiers in the Loire Valley. 

Maybe the kitchen?

The abbey was founded in the early 1100s as part of the Benedictine order -- most unusually, with structures housing both monks and nuns, and with both sections ruled by an abbess. 

Eleanor and her descendants funded the abbey, and Eleanor moved there in 1200, as she does in The Queen's Granddaughter. She lived at Fontevraud until her death in 1204 and is buried there alongside her husband King Henry II of England and her son Richard the Lionheart. King John's wife Isabelle is also buried there, though her effigy is weirdly smaller than the others. Eleanor herself commissioned the effigies (making sure she was shown reading a book!), so we can only speculate what this means she thought about Isabelle, whom she sort of kidnapped to give to her son John as a wife.

Fontevraud has been declared a UNESCO site since our last visit, and it shows -- much of the abbey has been renovated and it is more crowded. Still, a hush falls when you enter the chapel that holds the bones of the Plantagenet kings and queens. To me, Fontevraud is the place where it is easiest to imagine Eleanor of Aquitaine -- weary at the end of her life, but completely in charge, designing her own tomb and still holding court, even if she ruled only over monks and nuns.